A video recap of flight day 1 of the STS-134 mission of space shuttle Endeavour to the International Space Station - Watch how it looks inside a space shuttle

An exhaust cloud forms around Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida as space shuttle Endeavour soars into the sky on the STS-134 mission to the International Space Station.

NASA's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft No. 911, with the space shuttle orbiter Endeavour securely mounted atop its fuselage, taxies to the runway to begin the ferry flight from Rockwell's Plant 42 at Palmdale, California, where the orbiter was built, to the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

NASA's Space Shuttle mission STS-134 is the final flight for Endeavour and the second to last flight for the Space Shuttle Program. Endeavour cleared the pad just after 1826 Indian time 16th May (1256 GMT; 1356 BST). Its thunderous rise into a bright morning sky over the Kennedy Space Center in Florida was watched by hundreds of thousands of spectators.It is now on a path to rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday.The ship will deliver a $2bn particle physics experiment, known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), and a tray of critical spare parts.

On Endeavour's return, the only active ship left in the US space agency's (Nasa) shuttle fleet will be Atlantis.It should undertake its final mission sometime in in July STS -135.

Endeavour’s 16-day mission will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) to the International Space Station. AMS, a particle physics detector, is designed to search for various types of unusual matter by measuring cosmic rays. Its experiments are designed to help researchers study the formation of the universe and search for evidence of dark matter, strange matter and antimatter. Endeavour also will fly the Expedite the Processing of Experiment to Space Station (Express) Logistics Carrier 3 (ELC-3), a platform that carries spare parts that will sustain space station operations once the shuttles are retired from service. The mission will feature four spacewalks to do maintenance work and install new components. These are the last scheduled spacewalks by shuttle crew members.

Endeavour - the Name the Glory

Endeavour was NASA's fifth and final space shuttle orbiter to join the fleet at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Endeavour also is known inside the space agency by its designation Orbiter Vehicle-105, or OV-105. Construction of Endeavour began on Sept. 28, 1987, and it rolled out of the assembly plant in Palmdale, Calif., on April 1991. For the first time, a national competition involving students in elementary and secondary schools produced the name of the new orbiter. After receiving 6,154 entries, representing more than 70,000 students, NASA chose Endeavour and it was announced by President George Bush in 1989. The name comes from a ship chartered to traverse the South Pacific in 1768 and captained by 18th century British explorer James Cook, an experienced seaman, navigator and amateur astronomer. Endeavour first launched May 7, 1992, on the STS-49 mission to capture the INTELSAT VI communications satellite and re-release it into a geosynchronous orbit. In 1993, Endeavour embarked on STS-61, the first servicing mission to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Endeavour, on its final mission, STS-134, will be the second space shuttle retired from NASA's fleet. The first that is retired is the Discovery ( the most Shuttled Space Shuttle).

The Strange Particle Detector

The AMS, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, particle detector onboard the very last mission of the space Shuttle Endeavour will be installed on the International Space Station from where it will explore the Universe for a period of over 10 years. AMS will address some of the most exciting mysteries of modern physics, looking for antimatter and dark matter in space, phenomena that have remained elusive up to now.

In laboratories like CERN, physicists observe matter and antimatter behaving in an almost identical way. Each matter particle has an equivalent antiparticle, very similar but with opposite charge. When particles of matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate. Matter and antimatter would have been created in equal amounts at the Big Bang, yet today we live in a Universe apparently made entirely of matter. Does nature have a preference for matter over antimatter? One of the main challenges of AMS will be to address this question by searching for single nuclei of antimatter that would signal the existence of large amounts of antimatter elsewhere in the Universe. To achieve this, AMS will track cosmic rays from outer space with unprecedented sensitivity.

“The cosmos is the ultimate laboratory,” said Nobel laureate and AMS Spokesperson Samuel Ting. “From its vantage point in space, AMS will explore such issues as Antimatter, Dark Matter and the origin of Cosmic Rays. However, its most exciting objective is to probe the unknown because whenever new levels of sensitivities are reached in exploring an unchartered realm, exciting and unimagined discoveries may be expected. “

In the same way that telescopes catch the light from the stars to better understand the Universe, AMS is a particle detector that will track incoming charged particles such as protons, electrons and atomic nuclei that constantly bombard our planet. By studying the flux of these cosmic rays with very high precision, AMS will have the sensitivity to identify a single antinucleus among a billion other particles.

“This is a very exciting moment for basic science,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We expect interesting complementarities between AMS and the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) . They look at similar questions from different angles, giving us parallel ways of addressing some of the Universe’s mysteries.”

AMS may also bring an important contribution to the search for the mysterious dark matter that would account for about 25% of the total mass-energy balance of the Universe. In particular, if dark matter is composed of supersymmetric particles, AMS could detect it indirectly by recording an anomaly in the flux of cosmic rays.

“Never in the history of science have we been so aware of our ignorance,” said AMS Deputy Spokesperson Roberto Battiston. “Today we know that we do not know anything about what makes up 95% of our Universe”.

AMS is a CERN recognized experiment and as such has benefited from CERN’s expertise in integrating large projects, from CERN’s vacuum and magnet groups and from test beam facilities for calibrating the detectors. In addition, the Payload Operation Centre (POC) of AMS will open in June 2011 at CERN, very near to the place where the AMS detector was assembled in clean room facilities. From the POC, physicists will be able to run the AMS detector as well as receive and analyse data arriving from the International Space Station.

AMS is the result of a large international collaboration with a major European participation. It is led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting and involves about 600 researchers from CERN Member States (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland) as well as from China, Korea, Mexico, Taiwan, and the United-States.